1. Technical Field
The disclosure relates generally to access control to data resources, and more particularly to owner controlled access to shared data resources.
2. Background Art
In a shared file system, controlling accesses to the data is necessary to create secured environments. Some existing file systems, such as the Andrew File System (AFS) and Distributed File System (DFS), have very sophisticated access control lists (ACL), but they cannot be managed efficiently. In addition, AFS or DFS file systems are additional costs to owners of existing infrastructures. The presently predominant shared file systems in use, i.e., Network File System (NFS) and Common Internet File System (CIFS), also known as Server Message Block (SMB), are widely used because they come with the respective operating systems without extra charge. The access control for NFS and CIFS requires manual intervention from a system administrator. In a large environment, the system administrator may need to request a notification from the data owner, wait for a response from the data owner, manually update the necessary ACL, i.e., /etc/netgroup for the NIS server and use a GUI to add a “userid” to the CIFS server, and then finally notify a user of the update for the user to access the data. Such an access control procedure is time consuming and labor intensive.